Australia can be as atavistic as the US about certain things (e.g., climate change prevention), but at least they are ahead of us in dumping old beliefs:

A poll carried out for 32 years finds Australian biology students are abandoning the idea of divine involvement in human origins

A new study just published in Evolution: Education and Outreach suggests that contemporary Australian university students give far more credit than the previous generation to the science of human evolution and far less credit to creationism or divine guidance.

In a picture:

Image: Figure-1.-The-results-of-the-survey-and-the-results-of-the-Australian-na…-768x937.png

Interesting that the percentage declaring “none” on the census is still far less than those declaring a belief in a totally naturalistic evolution for humans. However, the latter is a sampling of biology students, and maybe this is telling us that religious people are less likely to study biology?

Anyway, the research paper:

Thirty two years of continuous assessment reveal first year university biology students in Australia are rapidly abandoning beliefs in theistic involvement in human origins

The results have demonstrated a downward shift over time from 60% of the class in 1986 believing a god had something to do with the origin of humans, to 29% in 2017. Conversely, the percentage of students convinced that a god had nothing to do with the origin of humans rose from 25% in 1986 to 62% in 2017. The creationist belief that a god created the world de novo within the last 10,000 years declined from 10% in 1986 to 3.6% in 2017. The decline in the Australian students’ commitment to religious views about divine creation, especially creationism, considerably exceeded the corresponding beliefs among American students and their general public, where belief in creationism while slowly declining appears to have remained in the 40% range, four times that seen in our Australian survey.